In wireless mobile communications, a channel that couples a transmitter to a receiver is often time-varying due to relative transmitter-receiver motion and multipath propagation. Such a time-variation is commonly referred to as fading, and may severely impair system performance. When a data rate for the system is high in relation to channel bandwidth, multipath propagation may become frequency-selective and cause intersymbol interference (ISI). By implementing Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) at the transmitter and FFT at the receiver, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) converts an ISI channel into a set of parallel ISI-free subchannels with gains equal to the channel's frequency response values on the FFT grid. A cyclic prefix, which is inserted before each transmitted block and is removed from each received block, is used to reduce or eliminate inter-block interference that is induced by the ISI channel.
To mitigate fading effects, whether frequency-flat or frequency-selective, many conventional wireless systems often employ some form of error-control coding (EC). Examples of popular EC schemes include block codes, e.g., (Reed-Solomon or BCH), convolutional codes, Trellis or coset codes, and Turbo-codes. Some of these codes also require Channel State Information (CSI) at the transmitter, which may be unrealistic or too costly to acquire in wireless applications where the channel changes on a constant basis.
OFDM affords simple channel equalization because it renders the ISI channel equivalent to a number of single-tap ISI-free subchannels, and thus only a one-tap division is needed to equalize each subchannel. However, without EC coding, OFDM transmissions are reliably decoded only when the channel does not experience deep fades (frequency nulls), or, when the transmitter has CSI so that the subchannels with deep fades are excluded from carrying information.
Diversity is another counter-measure that can be used against fading, and comes in different forms, including frequency, time, and space. Diversity manifests itself in the average system performance as the asymptotic slope of the error-rate versus signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) curve in a log-log scale (asymptotic in SNR). Increased diversity order is therefore desired to achieve high performance. EC coding can achieve certain order of diversity, but to increase diversity, an increase in decoding complexity is usually necessary. For example, with convolutional coding, diversity increase can lead to an exponential increase in decoding complexity.